With the proliferation of information on the Internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to prepare and deliver content to end users in an efficient and timely manner. Current content delivery systems employ various content publishing techniques. Typically, most web sites are produced by in-sequence publishing actions. For example, a set of web pages can be generated by an application server and made available to a web server for appropriate actions. In other words, to implement a web site, a set of web pages may be produced at an application layer and published at a presentation layer.
In response to an end user request, the web server may serve one or more web pages to the end user. As repeatedly serving frequently requested web pages can consume resources, dynamically generated web pages can be cached to quickly service user requests and conserve processing and network resources. Thus, when an end user elects to “refresh” previously delivered content (e.g., by clicking a “Refresh” button on a browser application's menu), the same content may be retrieved from a cache and again delivered to that end user.
All of the web pages implementing a web site can be updated as needed or reproduced at some regular interval to incorporate changes in the content. However, in conventional content delivery systems, all of the web pages implementing the web site may have to be reproduced. Moreover, changes made to the content may only be taken into account at the intervals at which the web pages are reproduced. Thus, web pages delivered to an end user may, for a period of time, contain stale content. In addition, reproducing web pages for each and every web site affected by certain changes may require a long period of time.
Another content publishing technique involves portal applications or standard Java® service or Server Page (JSP) applications. These applications typically have dynamic scripting capability that can work in tandem with hypertext markup language (HTML) code to separate the logic of a page from its static elements (e.g., the actual design layout and display of the page). The extracted portion of the page can then be used to make dynamic database queries and assemble pages on-the-fly accordingly. However, the logic and the content underlying the pages assembled on-the-fly can be modified after the pages are delivered, thereby allowing stale content to remain in circulation.